I grew up around big hydroelectric projects, and my dad supervised some major dam and canal projects. But industrial subject matter per se is not what interests me, but how Sheeler composed things. He was essentially a Constructivist, no doubt influenced by Cubism, and one of the first to think of photography as potentially being a first cousin to what was going on in abstract art .... but by no means THE first. That honor goes to Carlton Watkins, who, in his most prescient big albumen contact prints, learned to layer landscape themes in a sophisticated manner even before abstract painting was beginning to sneak through the keyhole with Cezanne and his own geometrically iconized landscapes. Most pontificators pay attention only to the "frontier" mentality of Watkins, and don't relate to just how sophisticated some of his finest compositions were : Constructivist before Constructivism ever formally existed.